It's All Geek to Me

BYOB (Bring Your Own Boardgames)

Another question that keeps coming up is: "Will there be house games available to play at DeeTwenty?"

Lots of geeks wish there was a way to show up at the club and just start playing, without owning the game in question. We wish that too. We really do!

But, alas, we've tried to figure out a way of making it possible, and we've come up with nothing feasible.

Turns out, offering some kind of boardgame library is really hard. Whether it's something as exotic as Star Trek Catan or as common as 30 Seconds, almost all boardgames have one thing in common: they have lots of bits and pieces.

Lots of 'em

That's part of what makes boardgames fun, right?

Problem is, that's exactly what makes it almost impossible to maintain a boardgame library. Each time someone returns a game, the Geek On Duty (GOD) would have to go through the box checking that each little piece, token, counter and card was accounted for. With Chess, that's easy enough. With Monopoly that's a half-hour exercise.

Add to that the fact that most of the geekier boardgames are pretty expensive. That's okay if you want to buy a copy of Carcasonne to play at home or share with your friends, but if we were to buy enough copies for anyone at the club who wants one to play with, it becomes prohibitively expensive.

Even this guy wouldn't spend that kind of cash

Given that the start-up costs are insurmountable, and the amount of work involved in maintaining it would be a full-time job, we've decided not to offer a game library at the club in the foreseeable future.

But how do we get to try new games? We see a couple of ways of getting this right.

One way is to gather around you a group of boardgame fans. If each of you buys a couple of games and plays it with the others, you can easily amass a boardgame selection much larger than any one geek can collect on his or her own. If you want to play a game you don't own yourself, connect to your buddy who does, and arrange to meet at the club for a games night.

If none of your friends are into boardgames, odds are there are plenty of other DeeTwenty members who are looking for extra players for their games. Just post a message on the Google+ community that you're looking to play a certain game, and if anyone can help out, they'll respond there.

We're working on plans to stock a few boardgames in The Armoury , and we're hoping to host some boardgame demo days where the suppliers can introduce new players to their games. So keep an eye on this site and our Facebook and Google+ pages for announcements about that.

If any DeeTwenty members feel that they'd be up to the challenge of running their own boardgame library at the club, we'd be happy for you to do that. Get in touch with us, and we'll figure out the details.